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"After all the hours put in by librarians and staff to cut the database sourcing with Amazon, now they'll own it again? Does that mean that all our work will go away and then Amazon info will be downloaded back to GR?"

pinkushun (1467193) writes "Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies.

Panopticlick tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. Click below and you will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.

pinkushun (1467193) writes "Aljazeera.net news reports that a US company, Narus, provided Telecom Egypt deep packet inspection tools, to track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.

The Huffingtonpost tells us who else is using this technology, and that when commercial network operators use DPI, the privacy of Internet users is compromised. But in government hands it can crush dissent and lead to human rights violations."Link to Original Source

pinkushun (1467193) writes "Julian Assange was named "un-Australian of the Year" by a Australian men's magazine Zoo. Runners up include God, after he "flooded two-thirds of Queensland", and Denmark's royal daughter in third place for her newfound Danish accent. It's ironic that a "mens" mag lacks the balls to admit what Julian did, was a ballsy move to begin with."Link to Original Source

pinkushun (1467193) writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims "It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!", pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol.Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as/. doesn't display the U0161 character."Link to Original Source

pinkushun (1467193) writes "A TSQL bug causes SCOPE_IDENTITY() and @@IDENTITY to return incorrect values when a parallel query plan is generated. The original report, filed Feb 2008, includes a script to recreate this behaviour. After confirming this bug a month later, users became quite upset that Microsoft reported that "we can't fix this for SQL 2008." (and not in 2005 either). Two years later and there is still no resolution. I'm worried since client-server systems is my bread and butter."Link to Original Source

pinkushun (1467193) writes "The Misa digital MIDI guitar, created by a software engineer, Michael, replaces the strings with 144 keycaps to control the notes, and a touch screen LCD controls up to 4 MIDI parameters. It runs Linux kernel 2.6.31 with a stripped down version of Gentoo. See the site for more details, and a demo video of it in action."Link to Original Source

pinkushun (1467193) writes "The RICA ACT came into effect on July 1 2009 in South Africa, which will allow your voice calls, 3G data transmission, text & MMS messages to be monitored & recorded, without a court order!
This is obviously a faux legal act to be used and abused by the corrupt government, and living in this country does give you a real perspective of what is possible.
The official statement mentions that "both prepaid and contract would be required to show proof of identity to be registered". With the majority of prepaid users being teens between 13 and 21, registering will be problematic, to say the least.
Read more of the local opinions here"